I think the trouble with “the real failure mode is having not enough of either” is that having either requires resources such as intelligence and force invested into norms. So when you look at how it’s functioned in different periods and locations, it is potentially confounded by amount of resources available to the society.
Or another way of looking at it is that by looking at the things that have actually existed, you miss the cases where too strong norms cause collapse and thereby nonexistence, and degenerate into a system with weaker norms.
Or another way of looking at it is that by looking at the things that have actually existed, you miss the cases where too strong norms cause collapse and thereby nonexistence, and degenerate into a system with weaker norms.
Do you have any examples of societies where, for example, anti-corruption norms were too strong (too much R) and that led to some kind of collapse? Or societies which demanded too much accountability from their leaders (too much L), and that led to collapse?
I don’t know enough history to come up with concrete examples and I’m not sure it’s even happened in large-scale societies in practice because people might err towards smaller norms or because they notice something goes wrong before applying it to the whole society.
However, surely you can see how the standard impose costs? To prevent corruption, one thing you could do less delegation of things/do more review of the decisions made by those you delegate to. But in the limit this means having the king make all the decisions, which is just not viable. Mechanistically, something would go wrong.
To prevent corruption, one thing you could do less delegation of things/do more review of the decisions made by those you delegate to.
That’s not the only way to prevent corruption. It’s not even the way most societies prevent corruption in practice. In practice, most societies with low levels of corruption prevent it by creating a set of social norms, which people internalize, that, in turn, prevents them from acting in ways that benefit themselves, but hurt the society in which they operate. These social norms also ensure that when corruption is detected, it’s punished severely, with both social and legal sanctions.
We (and by “we”, I mean those of us living in “the West”, broadly speaking) don’t prevent corruption via intrusive checks on every single government process. Instead we inculcate values of honesty and good faith, have legal consequences for corruption when it is detected, and rely on individual citizens to report corruption when it does occur.
This is possible because we live in a society that has both high R and high L. We have high standards for everyone, and broadly expect that most people, whether they’re high-ranking politicians or low-ranking civil servants will not enrich themselves at the expense of the public purse. That is why I’m saying that there’s no tradeoff between having high R and having high L, and, in fact, the two may actually be mutually synergistic.
EDIT: Indeed, this synergy is one of the the main arguments against lowering standards for L. As the saying goes, “the fish rots from the head”. Tolerating more misbehavior among leaders leads to an organization where lower level malfeasance is tolerated too.
I can buy that for types of rule-violations that will eventually get caught, punishing rule-violations severely and instilling values to avoid them is a good and cost-effective approach. But some types of rule-violations are complicated to detect, and if people want to prevent those, they have to proactively gather information or create broader limitations, both of which seem costly.
In the specific case of corruption, in Denmark (and most of the EU? idk) we have something called “udbud”, where basically when the government needs some firm to do a job, it has to create a description of the job and put it out on the free market. From what I’ve heard, udbud is super chaotic, costly and unreliable, and I bet it could be done more efficiently if more flexibility was allowed on the part of the decision-makers (consider: most companies do not seem to use udbud in the same rigid way). However, that would trade off against corruption in complex ways.
Within the region were L and R are both cheap, I agree that L and R are both good. But advanced forms of bad behavior often don’t seem to get legibly detected, which prevents the automatic approach that you seem to be suggesting.
I think the trouble with “the real failure mode is having not enough of either” is that having either requires resources such as intelligence and force invested into norms. So when you look at how it’s functioned in different periods and locations, it is potentially confounded by amount of resources available to the society.
Or another way of looking at it is that by looking at the things that have actually existed, you miss the cases where too strong norms cause collapse and thereby nonexistence, and degenerate into a system with weaker norms.
Do you have any examples of societies where, for example, anti-corruption norms were too strong (too much R) and that led to some kind of collapse? Or societies which demanded too much accountability from their leaders (too much L), and that led to collapse?
I don’t know enough history to come up with concrete examples and I’m not sure it’s even happened in large-scale societies in practice because people might err towards smaller norms or because they notice something goes wrong before applying it to the whole society.
However, surely you can see how the standard impose costs? To prevent corruption, one thing you could do less delegation of things/do more review of the decisions made by those you delegate to. But in the limit this means having the king make all the decisions, which is just not viable. Mechanistically, something would go wrong.
That’s not the only way to prevent corruption. It’s not even the way most societies prevent corruption in practice. In practice, most societies with low levels of corruption prevent it by creating a set of social norms, which people internalize, that, in turn, prevents them from acting in ways that benefit themselves, but hurt the society in which they operate. These social norms also ensure that when corruption is detected, it’s punished severely, with both social and legal sanctions.
We (and by “we”, I mean those of us living in “the West”, broadly speaking) don’t prevent corruption via intrusive checks on every single government process. Instead we inculcate values of honesty and good faith, have legal consequences for corruption when it is detected, and rely on individual citizens to report corruption when it does occur.
This is possible because we live in a society that has both high R and high L. We have high standards for everyone, and broadly expect that most people, whether they’re high-ranking politicians or low-ranking civil servants will not enrich themselves at the expense of the public purse. That is why I’m saying that there’s no tradeoff between having high R and having high L, and, in fact, the two may actually be mutually synergistic.
EDIT: Indeed, this synergy is one of the the main arguments against lowering standards for L. As the saying goes, “the fish rots from the head”. Tolerating more misbehavior among leaders leads to an organization where lower level malfeasance is tolerated too.
I feel like we have different things in mind.
I can buy that for types of rule-violations that will eventually get caught, punishing rule-violations severely and instilling values to avoid them is a good and cost-effective approach. But some types of rule-violations are complicated to detect, and if people want to prevent those, they have to proactively gather information or create broader limitations, both of which seem costly.
In the specific case of corruption, in Denmark (and most of the EU? idk) we have something called “udbud”, where basically when the government needs some firm to do a job, it has to create a description of the job and put it out on the free market. From what I’ve heard, udbud is super chaotic, costly and unreliable, and I bet it could be done more efficiently if more flexibility was allowed on the part of the decision-makers (consider: most companies do not seem to use udbud in the same rigid way). However, that would trade off against corruption in complex ways.
Within the region were L and R are both cheap, I agree that L and R are both good. But advanced forms of bad behavior often don’t seem to get legibly detected, which prevents the automatic approach that you seem to be suggesting.